Having followed the LinkNYC rollout from day 1, and well before day 1 at that, I could fill a book with my observations about the program and the product. That book would bore almost anybody to hell, but I might find it cathartic.
I’ve been in contact with people who have differing interests in LinkNYC – journalists, payphone users, artists, and others. As outsiders we have no consensus, only speculation, about the status of the program and why new installations of the machines ground to a halt around May, 2018.
I first reported on this development, which coincided with the demolition of the original LinkNYC manufacturing plant in Astoria.
Kiosks had gone up at a pace of over a hundred a month. Since May, 2018, there have been virtually none, making the deadline for 10,000 installations seem impossible to meet.
But what about these 10,000 kiosks? How did we get to a point where placing 10,000 of them, with their 20,000 screens blinking advertisements 24 hours a day every 50 feet as far as the eye can bleed, how did we get to where that seemed like an unassailable proposition? How did we get here?
The question deserves some objective historical context.
The presence of display advertising on public telephone booths in New York dates back to 1985, when New York’s Board of Estimate ordered New York Telephone to remove 170 display advertisements the company had, it said, illegally installed on its outdoor phone booths. New York Telephone’s booths had been advertising-free since they first started appearing in 1959.
New York Telephone disputed the claim, saying they needed no permits or permission from the City to put ads on their booths. But the company, not wanting a showdown with the City, nevertheless applied for a franchise and ultimately worked out financial arrangements which sent 22.2% of the display advertising revenue to the City.
From then on NY Telephone played by the rules, seeking community board approval and other such formalities before installing advertisements on their phone booths.
But that development, where New York Telephone went rogue and decided to monetize its money-losing phone booths with display advertising, is essentially the ancestor of LinkNYC. It also goes a long way toward explaining why New York had a supply of payphone booths and enclosures that greatly exceeded demand for the payphones they contained. Phone booths became an ad platform, with the public pay telephone a subsidized amenity, not unlike LinkNYC.
Once that ad revenue started coming in so, too, did the display advertising. Previously money-pit phone booths turned into unlikely profit centers for both New York Telephone and the City.
It was not just display advertising that caused the payphone landscape in New York to change in the mid-1980s. Independent payphone service providers came onto the scene around that time, thanks to the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly on payphones.
But despite deregulation New York Telephone, which later became NYNEX, maintained its monopoly franchise on all of New York’s outdoor and curbside phones, limiting where independent payphone providers could do business. They were limited to places like convenience stores, bars, and other indoor spaces.
NYNEX kept its monopoly on outdoor payphones all the way until 1996, 12 years after deregulation kicked in, when the City finally allowed independent payphone service providers to put phones on city sidewalks and street corners. This move was intended to broaden competition and get payphones in locations NYNEX did not or would not serve, like higher-crime neighborhoods and more isolated places.
It has been said that NYNEX squandered the monopoly it held for so long by not expanding its phone booth footprint ahead of the arrival of the independents, giving the latter more opportunity than they even knew what to do with.
The City received thousands upon thousands of applications from the independents, and before you knew it payphones were popping up like proverbial mushrooms, filling seemingly every nook and cranny of city sidewalks, bringing to the streets unknown quantities of more advertising on some of the enclosures.
Fast forward to 2013, when the franchise contracts between the City and the dozen or so remaining independent payphone providers were coming to an end. The “Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge” was announced by then Mayor Bloomberg.
Informing this contest was the assumption that payphones, about 7,500 of them remaining at the time, had to be replaced, and even supplemented, by some kind of Smart City, futuristic initiative.
The ambitions of this objective never faced serious question or scrutiny, it seems, with no public hearings held where one might suggest or request that we save a measly quantity of copper landline payphones in strategic locations throughout the city.
It seems like common sense to keep a form of lowest common denominator form of communication available in case of emergencies. But that kind of thinking never seemed to have made it into the Design Challenge. Stanley Shor, Assistant Commissioner at DoITT, said, in substance, “We don’t need these anymore”.
LinkNYC kiosks will not function in extended blackouts, but guess what? It is entirely possible that most of the old payphones would not work, either.
A majority of New York’s outdoor payphones today connect via Verizon’s cellular network. The phones are also solar-powered, meaning they essentially function 100% off the grid. Phones like these are expected to stay alive for a good long time during a blackout, even the duration, since they are unaffected by the power supply.
But their ability to make phone calls would depend on Verizon’s cellular network remaining up and running during such an event. This has proven a dubious assumption in the past.
There remain a handful of old copper landline payphones around New York. These should be expected to work during a power outage. I know of three such phones in my area, and a few in other places. These phones, if you know where to find them, might be your only chance at making a phone call during the next extended power outage.
Not if the City gets rid of them.